Thicker Than Water

That momentary lapse of attention took me past the point where I could have made a run for it. The gang had me enclosed in a hollow semicircle now, and a metallic snikt sound from waist height told me that at least one of these likely lads had a flick knife. That first insidious sound was followed by several more from the same stable, and I could see blades sliding into hands in glittering profusion. It was as if a switch had been pulled somewhere. This had just stopped being a general for-form’s-sake intimidation and become something else: something more ritualised and more inevitable. If I couldn’t talk these little sods down this was going to get really messy.

‘What are you doing on my soil, you fucking queer?’ Johnno demanded, but his voice was dreamy rather than aggressive.

‘This?’ I said, making a circular gesture with my raised index finger. ‘This is your soil?’

‘That’s right.’ Johnno nodded twice, slowly, almost like a genuflection.

‘How far?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘How far is it yours? I mean, where does your soil begin and end?’

Johnno raised his hand, letting me see the knife for the first time. The blade was long and slender, barely tapering at all towards the point because it was more or less an ice-pick to begin with. He tapped the point of it against my chin.

‘I own the fucking blocks.’

‘All of them?’ I asked.

‘Johnno!’ Bic’s voice, calling from the distant outskirts, where he was invisible behind the wall of his elders and biggers. ‘He didn’t touch me.’

‘Shut up, Bic. Yeah. All of them.’

‘St size="3">‘So you’d be the one to ask about anything that was going down here?’

The briefest of pauses. ‘You don’t ask anything, cunt,’ Johnno said, and again his mild tone was at odds with the words. ‘I ask, and you answer. You sneak around here in the middle of the night. Touch up my fucking brother—’

He shoved me in the chest with his free hand to emphasise how pissed off this made him. My back was already to the parapet, so there was nowhere to go but down. Pity. Down was the one place where I was determined not to go.

I tried one last time. ‘I was looking for some information, ’ I said. ‘But if you’d rather I came back another time . . .’

Johnno laughed softly and suggestively. ‘Come back when they take the fucking stitches out,’ he suggested, and his hand drew back. In the gap between conception and execution I brought my head forward and nutted him on the bridge of the nose with all the force I could bring to it.

The decapitation technique is meant to work well in a dictatorship, where a lack of orders from the top can paralyse a political or military organisation not used to acting on its own initiative. But the rules for a rumble are simple, and these boys had clearly been in a few. They were on me in a second, the lad on my left grabbing me around the throat and the one on my right landing a hard punch on my chin before Johnno had even finished falling to the ground. I got in a couple more punches myself, but it was anybody’s guess where they landed. Then the sheer press of bodies made it impossible for me to do anything at all. My arms were caught and pinned: two fists gripped my hair and forced my head back.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Johnno climb to his feet, the lower half of his face masked in blood, like a red bandanna. He stared at me with impossibly wide eyes. At the same time, not breaking that gaze for a moment, he held out his hands, palms up. Someone put a knife into each of them. Oh great. I was about to be carved up by the two-blade kid.

But as he stepped in towards me the eager crowd moved, reluctantly, to let someone else squirm through. It was the kid, Bic. He stepped hastily in front of me, blocking his brother’s path.

‘I’ll tell Mum,’ he said.

‘Fuck off, Bic,’ Johnno yelled, brandishing the two knives over his head like a picador.

‘I’ll tell Mum,’ Bic repeated, and collapsed at my feet. His head made a hollow sound as it hit the concrete.

8

As though a voice had yelled ‘Cut!’ from the darkness beyond the street light, everyone instantly lost volition and direction. The hands holding me fell away. Johnno blinked three times, each slower than the last, as he stared down at his brother’s sprawled body. His bloodthirsty cohorts looked at a loss, almost embarrassed, unable even to hold each other’s gaze. I knew how they felt: some tremor had passed over and through us, and this was the pained lull between the quake an Ver’d the aftershock.

I knelt down and lifted Bic up, gently, in my arms.

‘Open the door,’ I said to the nearest bravo, hooking my head to point. He moved to obey, and as I stepped forward the ranks of Johnno’s gang parted. One burly acned teen put his knife-hand behind his back with incongruous shyness, as though he’d been caught flicking ink pellets at school.